


I'm me, I'm I

by Ineke Meyer (Tevere)



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Juvenilia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-01-29
Updated: 2005-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-09 18:27:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tevere/pseuds/Ineke%20Meyer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack's a part of this landscape, and Jack's fingers ground Daniel, descend him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm me, I'm I

It's an apple-green fall, September maybe, with the leaves just turning-- a dabble of an artist's brush painting gold streaks through the elms, then, as if in celebration, the same artist throwing the contents of his bucket into the air and entirely dousing the birch at the end of the street in canary yellow. Daniel smiles as he walks past it. He likes its rampant individualism; likes the way it stamps the street with its presence, pulling the rest of the town's lingering summer into an acknowledgement of fall.

"No red yet," Jack comments idly, because of course Jack's there, silver-haired and still keeping frosty with his easy ex-soldier's walk and scoping glances. "Nights are still too warm."

"Oh, I don't know about that," says Daniel mildly. The air already has a physicality to it, pressing his lips, cheeks, the tips of his fingers with cool, delicate precision. It's been a long time since the desert. A world -- many worlds -- away, and yet somehow he's reminded of it. Perhaps it's that the difference between Minnesota and the desert is too vast for his mind to process, so instead it pulls up the similarities: in a cool Midwest evening he sees that fragile minute just after a desert sunset, when a quick chill settles across the sand like a gauze scarf fluttering loose from a girl's fingers.

When they cross into the shadow of the elms, Daniel blows softly and a ghost of his breath wavers in front of them for the barest fraction of a second.

"It's going to get a lot colder than this," Jack says, narrowing his left eye playfully. The scar that bisects his eyebrow makes Daniel think of Ugaritic cuneiform word-separators: elegant vertical slashes through a dark line of text. "Minnesotans swim in this weather, ya know."

"Minnesotans have more balls than brains, then," Daniel says, then pretends to think about it. "Although-- what with how cold that water is..."

"Hey!"

Daniel laughs, slipping his hands into the pockets of his coat. With books tucked in the crook of his elbow and his boots crunching the first fallen leaves into the sidewalk, it feels like the idyllic American childhood he's come to terms with never having.

Someone's stovepipe sends up a slow ripple of blue smoke. It unfurls into the sky like a muezzin's call, thin and quavering above the poplar spires. Weather like this always seems to make the world pause, as though it's been dipped in glass: a remote landcape of soundless, breathless colour that makes Daniel feel as though he's just passing through. Observing. The chill dulls sensation on his skin; dulls the waxy scent of burning resins until all he can smell is cold, clean emptiness.

Jack's looking at a movement in a tree that might be a squirrel or a bird or might be neither.

Without losing interest in the bouncing foliage, Jack hooks his arm into Daniel's. His cool fingers interlace with Daniel's slightly sweaty ones, tucked inside Daniel's coat pocket. And Daniel would be surprised, except that he knows that this is how it goes, Jack's fingers pressed against his own, skin to skin with gradual warmth like a soft, slow melt.

Jack's a part of this landscape, and Jack's fingers ground Daniel, descend him.

\---

"Whoa."

Daniel steadies himself; pulls his hand cautiously from the surface of the small sphere. The spot where his hand rested is gleaming bare metal, as if countless other people's touches have worn it smooth.

"What?" Jack is hovering instantly, as protective as a machine-gun equipped mother hen. Sand kicks up around his boots in a hot, dry swirl.

Daniel frowns, says slowly, "I thought-- I thought I saw something."

"Something?" says Jack sharply. "The Virgin Mary in a piece of cheese, the second coming of Elvis? Give me specifics, Daniel."

"I'm _trying_," Daniel says, immediately annoyed. He pushes his hair out of his eyes; makes an abortive attempt at tucking it behind his ear. "I don't know what it was. It felt like... I don't know, a memory or something."

The white sky is scorching the images from him, sterilising away the delicate cold with ruthless efficiency. He's suddenly aware of sand between his teeth, and the familiarity is enough that he's almost swamped with a sudden uprising of raw pain. _Abydos--_

Sha're.

In the -- dream, vision, addled hallucination, whatever it'd been -- he'd remembered the desert, thought of it with a faint, almost sweet, sadness.

He'd _felt_ it, when he was the him-that-wasn't-him. But he can't conceptualise it now; can't equate it, make it mesh with his current state of suspended grief. So it is like a memory: it's like remembering being joyous, when all you're experiencing -- and all that you can see in the future -- is pain.

"There's that _something_ again. Is that what this thing does?" Jack jabs his gun at the sphere, feet solidly apart in battle-readiness. "Pulls out our memories? We're a top-secret military installation, in case you've forgotten, and I don't even want to _start_ thinking about the paperwork for an alien security breach."

"I said it _felt_ like a memory, not that it _was_ a memory," Daniel corrects irritably. He doesn't want to be on this desert planet any longer, with its uncomfortably stirred memories -- real and imagined. "I don't think it's important."

"Daniel, you don't say you think you saw something and then say it's not important."

"Well, it's not, all right?"

Jack regards him steadily from behind his sunglasses. "What do the inscriptions say the thing does?"

Daniel sighs in frustration. "Look, contrary to popular belief, not all alien technology comes with how-to instructions carved on the side of the box." He waves an impatient hand at the rough-hewn sandstone plinth. "This one says, oh, _Dedicated by_ someone _on behalf of the Council to the townspeople, this day the fortieth of_ something. It's not a weapon. It's just a... plaything, where the people gather. Like a town wishing well, I suppose."

"Except this one actually shows you something you've wished for?"

Daniel laughs then, feeling wryness and bitterness and genuine humour all twist together painfully inside himself. "No, Jack. Not something I've wished for."

Daniel remembers what it's like to love Jack O'Neill, but he doesn't love him now.

This, here, this is Jack: solid, dependable, infuriating, military to the heart and bone. Daniel looks deep inside himself and knows that he respects Jack; sees Jack as perhaps the best friend he's ever had. But if he'd had the chance to trade Jack's friendship for Sha're -- to have never unburied the Stargate, to have never thrown back that tissue box -- he knows he'd have done it.

The sand in his mouth tastes like regret, rough and dry.

"It's not dangerous?"

Daniel is jerked out of his reverie. "Oh-- no."

"Good," says Jack, and lets his gun fall loose around his neck as he reaches for the sphere. He's greying at the temple, a clean silver, although the rest of his hair is still brown.

Daniel catches Jack's wrist. "Don't."

Jack's skin is sticky with sunscreen, gritty, and hot. Daniel lets him go.

"All right," Jack says slowly. His hands are on the gun again. He considers Daniel silently, and Daniel can see himself reflected back in the implacable mirror surface: an improbable funhouse image, with white-faced with eyes tight behind huge spectacles.

Jack nods, clicks his radio without taking his eyes off Daniel. "All right," he says again, and Daniel knows, strangely, that Jack understands. After all, Jack has more things he'd rather not remember; more things regretted. "Carter, we're coming back in. Dial the Gate."

"Thanks," Daniel says, into the silence that follows.

"De nada." Jack's looking around the town, a final once-over before they head to the Gate to meet Sam and Teal'c. "If it's not a weapon we don't want it, anyway."

Jack is military and Daniel isn't. Jack thinks like a soldier because he's been nothing else but one.

But Daniel remembers the feel of Jack's fingers intertwined with his, and they weren't a soldier's fingers, but a lover's.

"What? What? I got something on my face?" Jack asks, turning. His eyes are unreadable behind his sunglasses, but his eyebrows are quizzical. Daniel notices that they're dark, unlike his hair. Unscarred and whole.

"The grey suits you," Daniel says. The Gate is a blue shimmer over the nearest dune, and he starts walking.

Maybe what he's seen is a glimpse of an alternate universe, where he'd been to Abydos but never met Sha're. Maybe it's the future. Maybe it's one of many future possibilities. Maybe it means nothing.

Sand has crept into Daniel's boots, a familiar sensation that hurts like a self-administered pain to a bruise. Behind him, Jack grumbles at the pressure the soft sand's putting on his knees.

If that's how the future's going to be, it's how it's going to be.

But for now, he's looking for Sha're.

ENDS


End file.
